• by Dave Rudden
• April 15, 2010 10:17 AM PST

Room for the PlayStation Portable, a Sony-developed service that would allow PSP owners to create avatars while communicating and sharing media in real time, has been canceled, with no reason given for the halting of development.

After its under-promoted announcement at the 2009 Tokyo Game Show (link via G4TV), little additional information was brought to the U.S. about Room, the PlayStation Portable service that allowed owners of the handheld to communicate and share content with others, all with a cutesy avatar interface. Think of an anime version of Home and you’re headed in the right direction. While the service was being beta tested in Japan, the U.S’ exposure to the Room was almost non-existent.

The scarce info that came out of that show might be all we’ll ever know of PSP Room (or R∞M, if you want to follow Sony’s sometimes bizarre naming conventions), as development of the project has been stopped and the project has been canceled. Sony did not provide a reason for the cancellation, but has promised that the feedback culled from beta testers will be applied towards future projects.

Anyone mourning this project’s cancellation?

SOURCE: Sony Cancels PSP Social Network Game Room [andriasang]

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Sony's PSP 'Room' service canceled , News from GamePro

• by AJ Glasser
• January 25, 2010 09:42 AM PST

Micro-transactions are making a bigger impact in the major massively multiplayer online market. PoxNora, Free Realms, EverQuest, and EverQuest II are among the titles that will be affected by this new deal.

Sony Online Entertainment and microtransaction service provider Live Gamer announced a service deal this morning that would expand Live Gamer’s real money trading market in PoxNora, Free Realms, EverQuest, and EverQuest II.

The real money trading market is called “Elements.” The software powers microtransactions within games in a way that streamlines a lot of the fuss on both the technical side and the user side of massively multiplayer online games.

If just now you’re going “So what?” consider the fact that three years ago, the only free-to-play MMO anybody had ever heard of was Maple story. Microtransaction models have grown since then, slowly trickling into Western MMOs as more developers consider ditching their subscription-based models to get in on some of the (microtrans)action that Facebook games enjoy (see GamePro issue #258, “The Rise of Facebook Gaming”).

Speaking to GamePro, Live Gamer CEO Mitch Davis broke down the benefits of the deal to users and explained the evolution of the microtransaction model. “This is a business model that’s been popular in Japan and Korean,” he said. “Consoles aren’t as big in Asia, so online games evolved to microtransactions faster [than Western MMOs].”

Thanks to SOE’s partnership, Live Gamer is now powering 125 games globally. Davis said he expects that number to climb to 200 in North America alone before 2010 is out.

“When you look [at a game] like Free Realms, you know it’s good – it’s robust,” Davis said. “Elements enhances that, it provides a very robust microtransaction service for the user.”

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Sony Online Entertainment expands microtransaction service into EverQuest II, other MMOs